Posts Tagged ‘Thomas Jefferson’

“This member of the Government was at first considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs. But it has proved that the power of declaring what the law is, ad libitum, by sapping and mining slyly and without alarm the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force would not dare to attempt.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Edward Livingston, 1825. ME 16:114

“The Constitution . . . meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804. ME 11:51

“To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”
—Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:277

Why do we bother to go through the sham of voting and having elections? We really might as well just have one of those tyrant-regime-style “elections” where everybody gets to vote as long as they only vote for their “president for life.” Because that’s what we’ve got here now:

The law took away nearly all collective bargaining rights from most workers and has been in effect for more than a year.

Colas’ ruling comes after a lawsuit brought by the Madison teachers union and a union for Milwaukee city employees.

For city, county and school workers, the ruling returns the law to its previous status, before it was changed in March 2011, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported. However, Walker’s law remains largely in force for state workers, it reported.

Walker’s law prohibited state and local governments from bargaining over anything except cost of living adjustments to salaries. Haggling over issues such as health benefits, pensions and workplace safety was barred.

Gov. Walker said in a statement Friday that he expected the ruling will be overturned on appeal.

“The people of Wisconsin clearly spoke on June 5th,” he said in the statement posted on his Facebook page. “Now, they are ready to move on. Sadly a liberal activist judge in Dane County wants to go backwards and take away the lawmaking responsibilities of the legislature and the governor. We are confident that the state will ultimately prevail in the appeals process.”

“We believe the law is constitutional,” said Wisconsin Department of Justice spokeswoman Dana Brueck.

The proposal was introduced shortly after Walker took office in February last year. It sparked a firestorm of opposition and huge protests at the state Capitol that lasted for weeks. All 14 Democratic state senators fled to Illinois for three weeks in an ultimately failed attempt to stop the law’s passage by the Republican-controlled Legislature.

The law’s passage led to a mass movement to recall Walker from office, but he survived the recall election, becoming the first governor in U.S. history to do so.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

I didn’t know that “collective bargaining” was enshrined in our Constitution. Could somebody point out where? I guess I must have slept through that lecture in that Civics class I took or something.

It’s probably in the same damn penumbras and emanations that the right to murder your baby is in, I suppose.

I’m all for workers having the right to form a union and I’m all for the right of that union to be able to “collectively bargain.” As long as any employer – be that employer a small business owner, a CEO, a governor or a president – to be able to fire the ass of everybody who collectively bargained.

Again, where is it in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights that an employer loses the right to be able to fire workers? Where is it stated that if workers want more money, and they “collectivize,” that he or she can’t fire them and get better workers who are willing to work for the wages that the employer is willing to pay??? Where the hell is it stated that an unemployed worker who would very damn much love to have a job cannot have the right to be able to work for that wage that the employer is willing to pay??? Where is it in our Constitution that only UNION workers ought to have the right to a job?

That’s what makes “collective bargaining” so evil; it arbitrarily gives a “right” to a union and takes away the rights of every single business and every single worker who would be thrilled to work for the pay that the union worker snubs his nose at.

And I want to know where that judge found that – other than by looking rather far up his own butt.

That’s what we need now – and will need even more if Obama gets reelected; we need a judge to look far enough up his own ass to “find” whatever penumbra or emanation and declare that Obama’s election is unconstitutional and throw his butt out of office.

This nation is no longer a democracy, a republic, a democratic republic, or anything remotely like any of the above. It is an oligarchy of judicial activists and that is all that it is now.

A few other wise words of warning by Thomas Jefferson:

“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

“A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.”

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

We are to the point where that last one has become an important reality: our country has been stolen from us by black-robed usurpers, and we need to take it back from them.

I’ve been saying DemonCrats (that’s “Demonic Bureaucrats,” which is what “Democrat” truly stands for) despise their country. Now I’ve got über-liberal Harvard to back me up. Which is to say that this isn’t a case of Sarah Palin blasting away at Democrats and claiming Democrats don’t love their country; it’s an example of the liberal intelligentsia itself claiming that Democrats don’t love their country:

Democratic political candidates can skip this weekend’s July 4th parades. A new Harvard University study finds that July 4th parades energize only Republicans, turn kids into Republicans, and help to boost the GOP turnout of adults on Election Day.

“Fourth of July celebrations in the United States shape the nation’s political landscape by forming beliefs and increasing participation, primarily in favor of the Republican Party,” said the report from Harvard.

“The political right has been more successful in appropriating American patriotism and its symbols during the 20th century. Survey evidence also confirms that Republicans consider themselves more patriotic than Democrats. According to this interpretation, there is a political congruence between the patriotism promoted on Fourth of July and the values associated with the Republican party. Fourth of July celebrations in Republican dominated counties may thus be more politically biased events that socialize children into Republicans,” write Harvard Kennedy School Assistant Professor David Yanagizawa-Drott and Bocconi University Assistant Professor Andreas Madestam.

Their findings also suggest that Democrats gain nothing from July 4th parades, likely a shocking result for all the Democratic politicians who march in them.

“There is no evidence of an increased likelihood of identifying as a Democrat, indicating that Fourth of July shifts preferences to the right rather than increasing political polarization,” the two wrote.

The three key findings of those attending July 4th celebrations:

When done before the age of 18, it increases the likelihood of a youth identifying as a Republican by at least 2 percent.

It raises the likelihood that parade watchers will vote for a Republican candidate by 4 percent.

It boosts the likelihood a reveler will vote by about 1 percent and increases the chances they’ll make a political contribution by 3 percent.

What’s more, the impact isn’t fleeting. “Surprisingly, the estimates show that the impact on political preferences is permanent, with no evidence of the effects depreciating as individuals become older,”said the Harvard report.

Finally, the report suggests that if people are looking for a super-patriotic July 4th, though should head to Republican towns. “Republican adults celebrate Fourth of July more intensively in the first place.”

Conservatives have American Indendence Day, which we celebrate on July 4th in honor of our Declaration of Independence. Democrats hate the Declaration of Independence because it bases our separation from Great Britain on GOD and establishes the new nation that would consequently be born as a Judeo-Christian one. Liberals have Marxist May Day, i.e. DEpendence Day, instead.

It’s rather interesting, actually. I think of the analogy of the “Naksa”, or Israel’s defeat of Arab armies in the 1967 Six-Day War. It’s a day of celebration for Israelis, and a day of mourning for Palestinians. It’s a shame that Independence Day is nothing worthy of celebrating for Democrats. But when you realize that the independence and liberty the founding fathers created was independence and liberty from big government totalitarianism, and that Democrats yearn for the very thing that our founding fathers delivered us from, it starts to make perfect sense. Ben Franklin said, “Any people that would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety.” And Democrats who dream of a big government nanny state say, “Amen! Where can see sign up for that?”

Time Magazine: “We can pat ourselves on the back about the past 223 years, but we cannot let the Constitution become an obstacle to the U.S.’s moving into the future with a sensible health care system, a globalized economy, an evolving sense of civil and political rights.”

[…]

The Constitution does not protect our spirit of liberty; our spirit of liberty protects the Constitution. The Constitution serves the nation; the nation does not serve the Constitution.”

President Woodrow Wilson was an early progressive who actively rejected what the founding fathers said and intended. He argued that the meaning of the Constitution should be interpreted by judges, and not based on its words.

In his book, Constitutional Government in the United States, Wilson wrote: “We can say without the least disparagement or even criticism of the Supreme Court of the United States that at its hands the Constitution has received an adaptation and an elaboration which would fill its framers of the simple days of 1787 with nothing less than amazement. The explicitly granted powers of the Constitution are what they always were; but the powers drawn from it by implication have grown and multiplied beyond all expectation, and each generation of statesmen looks to the Supreme Court to supply the interpretation which will serve the needs of the day.”

Wilson and other progressives have failed to understand the consequence of rewriting the Constitution’s meaning and ignoring the intentions of the founding fathers. If this generation is not bound by yesterday’s law, then future generations will not be bound by today’s law.

If law is not a body of rules and can be arbitrarily manipulated, then the rule of man trumps the rule of law. And the founding principle that “all men are created equal” is replaced by “some men are more equal than others.” When people are governed by self-anointed rulers instead of elected representatives, they cannot be free.

When the Constitution was written, it was a radical departure from the despotic governments of its time. While Europeans were being ruled by the arbitrary edicts of kings, Americans revolted so they could become a self-governing people.

Because the founding fathers understood human nature, they structured the Constitution to permanently protect the people from the human shortcomings of their leaders. Human nature has not changed since America’s founding. So the need still exists for the protection provided by the Constitution.

And as Mark Levin points out, we can actually go back before that to see how liberals undermined America and undermined the Constitution by finding judges who would “interpret” it rather than just read it. Consider slavery, and consider the fact that the Democrat Party was the party of slavery and that the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist arm of the Democrat Party. And what justified slavery in the face of our founding documents which clearly condemned slavery? Liberal activist judges:

Levin: Activist Supreme Courts are not new. The Dred Scott decision in 1856, imposing slavery in free territories; the Plessy decision in 1896, imposing segregation on a private railroad company; the Korematsu decision in 1944, upholding Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of American citizens, mostly Japanese Americans; and the Roe decision in 1973, imposing abortion on the entire nation; are examples of the consequences of activist Courts and justices. Far from being imbued with special insight, these decisions have had dire consequences for our governmental system and for society.

“This member of the Government was at first considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs. But it has proved that the power of declaring what the law is, ad libitum, by sapping and mining slyly and without alarm the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force would not dare to attempt.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Edward Livingston, 1825. ME 16:114

“The Constitution . . . meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804. ME 11:51

“To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”
—Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:277

Democrats don’t love America. They haven’t for a long time. For my entire life, in fact.

America is based on the idea that man can govern himself, and that man can govern himself and should govern himself, within the just parameters of the Constitution they so painstakingly crafted for us:

The form of government secured by the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the Constitution is unique in history and reflects the strongly held beliefs of the American Revolutionaries.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on September 18, 1787, a Mrs. Powell anxiously awaited the results, and as Benjamin Franklin emerged from the long task now finished, asked him directly: “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic if you can keep it” responded Franklin.

The term republic had a significant meaning for both of them and all early Americans. It meant a lot more than just representative government and was a form of government in stark contrast to pure democracy where the majority dictated laws and rights. And getting rid of the English monarchy was what the Revolution was all about, so a monarchy was out of the question.

The American Republic required strict limitation of government power. Those powers permitted would be precisely defined and delegated by the people, with all public officials being bound by their oath of office to uphold the Constitution. The democratic process would be limited to the election of our leaders and not used for granting special privileges to any group or individual nor for defining rights.

But Democrats have always despised our founding fathers and the republic they gave us. Thomas Jefferson said:

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

“I think that we can say that the Constitution reflected the enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day and that the framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.”

And when you read our founding fathers, and understand their arguments and their worldview, you can readily understand why Obama has to characterize the founding fathers and the Constitution they wrote as “blind.”

Because Thomas Jefferson also said things like:

“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have.”

And:

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

And:

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”

And:

“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”

And:

“To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

And:

“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government”

But these notions are fundamentally incompatible with the vision of “America” Democrats have for this country. Which is why the founding fathers must be destroyed; their integrity demolished; their wisdom undermined.

Don’t tell me you love America, Democrats. You hate it. You’ve hated it for a long time. That’s why you embrace the following vision of this founding father:

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

The problem is that yours isn’t a founding father of America, but rather the founding father of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That quote that Democrats all affirm came from Karl Marx (see Obama’s paraphrase: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”) And if you are a Democrat who doesn’t affirm that statement, than explain to me as a Democrat why this central defining statement of communism – which flies in the face of what America’s founding fathers said – is in fact demonic and evil. And then explain to me how that statement has no part with the Democrat Party. Please.

Here is a transcript of what this fool passes off as “journalism” today:

O’DONNELL: Perhaps all of Michele Bachmann’s staff come from her district, which may be the most ignorant Congressional district in America. In 2010, 52 percent of that district voted for Michele Bachmann to represent them in Congress. Now, she had already proven time and time again to her district and to America that she is unworthy of representing any Congressional district in America. But 52 percent, the same percentage in that district who voted for John McCain for president, voted for Michele Bachmann in 2010.

What makes those voters so ignorant? Well, for starters, they are whiter than the average district. 92 percent white in fact.

O’DONNELL: But that explains nothing. Missouri’s 8th Congressional district is 91 percent white and has been represented by Jo Ann Emerson since 1997. We do not have a litany of imbecilic comments by Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson. In fact, we have none. If we’ve missed any, please submit them to our website, thelastword.msnbc.com, and we’ll see if they compare to Michele Bachmann’s.

Well, if that “explains nothing,” why bring it up? It’s almost like O’Donnell and his staff knew they were going too far with the 92 percent white remark, and felt they needed to soften it a little by bringing up Emerson’s district.

But the damage was already done. After all, imagine for a moment Bachmann was black, Emerson was black, these were black districts, and the commentator was a conservative:

What makes those voters so ignorant? Well, for starters, they are blacker than the average district. 92 percent black in fact. But that explains nothing. Missouri’s 8th Congressional district is 91 percent black and has been represented by Jo Ann Emerson since 1997. We do not have a litany of imbecilic comments by Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson. In fact, we have none. If we’ve missed any, please submit them to our website, thelastword.msnbc.com, and we’ll see if they compare to Michele Bachmann’s.

You think that would have gone over well in the black community, or would there be calls Tuesday for said conservative commentator’s immediate termination?

I guess along with feeling comfortable attacking white women as long as they’re conservative, O’Donnell now feels it’s acceptable to go after all white people.

I am so sick and disgusted with liberals. They are completely depraved people with a completely warped view of the world.

Liberals like Lawrence O’Donnell are totally committed to postmodernism, multiculturalism and pluralism. It’s not that they are intellecutally brainless idiots as much as it is that they have totally committed themselves to totally false theories about the world. Like the whole “Emperor’s New Clothes” story, these “intellectuals” have convinced themselves that their theories are the stuff of genius. Only the more they try to explain their genius theories, the more utterly idiotic they start sounding.

The book of Revelation is a work of fiction describing how a truly vicious God would bring about the end of the world. No half-smart religious person actually believes the book of Revelation. They are certain that their God would never turn into a malicious torturer and mass murderer beyond Hitler’s wildest dreams. Glenn Beck, of course, does believe the book of Revelation.

There is a reason why the Bible says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God'” (Psalm 14:1). And that is because any worldview which does not begin with a divine worldview is already wrong, and can only go more and more wrong as it continues to postulate bad answers to fundamental questions.

Our founding fathers understood this, and their understanding enabled them to found the world’s oldest democratic republic. They realized that democracy – a limited government of the people – demanded that people be able to govern themselves. And that only a moral and religious people could pull that off.

They fought a war over this principle encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – Declaration of Independence

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

“Of all the habits and dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.” — George Washington

But liberalism fundamentally denies this principle, and constantly seeks for the results of the French Revolution rather than the American Revolution. They refuse to realize that the atheism-based French Revolution inevitably resulted in first chaos and madness, and then a dictator (Napolean seized power within a decade); and that France has had 11 separate Constitutions since 1793, and at least fifteen different governments. Thomas Jefferson rightly said that, “With all the defects in our Constitution, whether general or particular, the comparison of our government with those of Europe, is like a comparison of Heaven with Hell.”

Can a white man be an anti-white male-bashing bigot? You’d assume not, until you realize that people like Lawrence O’Donnell are so damn arrogant that they view themselves as transcending their own race and gender even as they claim that everyone else beneath them is a slave to their own. But the fact of the matter is – to quote Barack Obama – “yes, we can.” We can believe a theory that necessarily makes us hate ourselves.

“Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand. Money degrades all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value set upon all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, of both nature and man, of its original value. Money is the essence of man’s life and work, which have become alienated from him. This alien monster rules him and he worships it.

“The God of the Jews has become secularized and is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange is the Jew’s real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange.” (“A World Without Jews,” p. 41)

Saliva samples taken from 39 relatives of the Nazi leader show he may have had biological links to the “subhuman” races that he tried to exterminate during the Holocaust.

Jean-Paul Mulders, a Belgian journalist, and Marc Vermeeren, a historian, tracked down the Fuhrer’s relatives, including an Austrian farmer who was his cousin, earlier this year.

A chromosome called Haplogroup E1b1b1 which showed up in their samples is rare in Western Europe and is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

“One can from this postulate that Hitler was related to people whom he despised,” Mr Mulders wrote in the Belgian magazine, Knack.

Just as Caucasian and male “journalist” Lawrence O’Donnell is clearly related to people he despises.

Can you be of a certain race and yet actively despise that race? I think we’ve established that you most certainly can, if you’re vile enough.

Lawrence O’Donnell is a pathological liberal ideologue. Progressive liberal pseudo-intellectualism is rabidly anti-white and anti-man. And so O’Donnell is those things, too. And the fact that O’Donnell is the very things he despises is at best a minor detail to him. Because liberals NEVER worry about inconvenient things like facts.

I would add one other element to the mix: the ingredient of self-hatred which is so necessary to liberalism.

Understand: liberals constantly agitate for policies that will bring about their nation’s certain destruction. You don’t do that sort of thing unless you hate yourself, hate the next generation, hate your country, and literally embrace your own extinction.

At some deep subconscious level, liberals like Lawrence O’Donnell recognize that they are swine, that they are nasty, nasty people. And from that point forward everything else just sort of oozes out of them like toxic slime from a poorly-designed container.

MSNBC has the right to broadcast. Unlike the fascist liberals who constantly agitate to force Rush Limbaugh and Fox News off the air with oxymoronic legislations such as “the fairness doctrine,” I accept that right. But that doesn’t mean anyone but fools need to watch it.

HUNTSVILLE, AL — Already dealing with an ongoing financial crisis that’s forcing layoffs and possible school closures, Huntsville City Schools now faces the threat of a lawsuit from the NAACP.

Local NAACP chapter president Alice Sams ripped the school system in a press conference Monday morning, while also presenting a list of demands the organization wants fulfilled immediately.

Sams and other leaders from Huntsville’s black community are accusing Huntsville City Schools of creating a divided system tilted against black students. The NAACP said the school district has failed to abide by a 1970 federal court order that officially eliminated segregation in schools for Alabama and other southern states.

“We have compiled a list of concerns, which in short is entitled ‘What We Want,” said Sams. “If satisfactory steps are not taken to satisfy our concerns, we may petition the state department of education to take over Huntsville City Schools and request Department of Justice and federal court intervention.”

NAACP officials say the alleged inequalities will only be made greater if several schools targeted for closure in predominantly black North Huntsville end up shutting their doors. The organization cited a forty point achievement gap between black and white students on standardized state tests, calling the results unfair and unacceptable. Sams said the blame did not fall on students or their parents, but rather on schools she claims are inferior compared to those in predominantly white South Huntsville. School closures are a likelihood as the district aims to overcome a $20 million budget deficit.

“It is our opinion that we have a divided system,” said Sams. “One for black students in the north end of town, separate, unequal and academically unsucessful; and one for the white students on the south end of town…All efforts to terminate the 1970 court order will be opposed by us until concerns to satisfy the racial and academic inequalities as stated are resolved.”

Sams ended her speech with a bold statement.

“Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible make violent revolution inevitable,” said Sams, who quoted former president John F. Kennedy. When asked to clarify her remarks hose who make peaceful revolutions impossible make violent revolution inevitableand how it applied to the context of the school system, she referred back to the original quote.

“You know what the quote means,” said Sams. “I quoted the president (Kennedy). He was a peaceful president, so I did a quote. You can interpret it anyway you want to, I just quoted.”

School board attorney J.R. Brooks declined our request for an on-camera interview and did not respond to the NAACP’s claims. He only said the school district had always been in compliance with federal court orders issued by the U.S. Department of Justice, and that the school board had no control or authority over people who had voluntarily moved in and out of North Huntsville since 1970.

Nothing in the mainstream news coverage about this as a racist remark or an instigation to violence. No depiction of, “Violent revolution is inevitable. And it will all be whitey’s fault when it comes.”

Now the media could have heard the words “violent revolution is inevitable” from the NAACP and immediately associated them with the views of a different black organization:

Samir: We didn’t come out here to play. There is to much serious business going on in your black community to be sliding through south street with white, dirty cracker whores on your arms. What’s a matter with you black man, you got a doomsday with a white woman on your arm.
……
“We keep begging white people for freedom. No wonder we’re not free. Your enemy can not make you free fool. You want freedom you’re going to have to kill some crackers. You’re going to have to kill some of their babies.

Let us get our act together. It’s time to wake up, clean up, and stand up.”

“I can’t wait for the day that they’re all dead. I won’t be completely happy until I see our people free and Whitey dead.”

“When you have 10 brothers in uniform, suited and booted and ready for war, white folks know these niggas ain’t their niggas. We kick white folks asses. We take it right to the cracker.”

“We’re going to keep putting our foot up the white man’s ass until they understand completely. We want freedom, justice and mutha[expletive]‘ equality. Period. If you ain’t gonna give it to us, mutha[expletive], we’re gonna take it, in the name of freedom.”

Now, it would have been very easy for the mainstream media to take the statement, “Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” and point out that in this case the inevitable “violent revolution” means killing crackers, killing white babies, and dealing harshly with white, dirty cracker whores. And the revolution will be over when “whitey dead.” You’ve got a call or at least a prediction of violent revolution coming from a specifically black and race-based organization, and you’ve got a very detailed description of what such black and race-based violent revolution would look like.

But they didn’t. After all, John Kennedy said those words, and he was a Democrat, so it obviously can’t be bad. And the black president of the NAACP is, of course, a sacred cow in the mainstream media, and her motives are beyond questioning. Ever.

Now let’s look at how the mainstream media deals with conservatives who would dare to quote great minds of the past who held great warnings for the future:

Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee for Harry Reid’s Nevada Senate seat, has called for armed revolt against the government. Glenn Beck’s new novel, The Overton Window, encourages concerned citizens to pick up a weapon, too. And they’re not the only public figures calling for violent insurrection.

In January right-wing radio host Lars Larson asked Tea Party favorite Angle where she stood on Second Amendment issues. She replied:

“You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason, and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.

“I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying, My goodness, what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”

We presume she means “take Harry Reid out” by means of the ballot box. Or even more charitably, perhaps for dinner to discuss the bizarre and extreme direction American politics has taken since Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Because Angle is not the only prominent figure, or even the only politician who has recently called for armed revolution.

Rick Barber, a candidate in the Republican primary for Alabama’s Second Congressional District, released an ad which ends with an actor dressed as George Washington declaring “Gather your armies.” Presumably to storm the same Congress that Barber is hoping to join.

The Overton Window, Beck’s new novel, is also out today. According to a Washington Post review, it is a parable on worthy insurrection in which earnest, plucky American patriots arm to fight an evil plot by elites bent on a government takeover. Beck calls it ‘faction’—which is a melding of ‘fact,’ and ‘fiction,’ apparently. “If the book is found tucked into the ammo boxes of self-proclaimed patriots,” writes the reviewer Steven Levingston, “…Beck will have achieved his goal.”

“The Overton Window,” Levingston concludes, “risks falling into the tradition of other anti-government novels such as The Turner Diaries, by William L. Pierce, which became a handbook of extremists and inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.”

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma City in April 2010, Tea Party leaders and conservative members of the state legislature decided to try to create an armed state militia “to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty,” according to the Associated Press. The group hopes to get legislation to recognize the new force by next year.

At around the same time as that plan was announced, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota told WWTC 1280 AM that she too wanted people “armed and dangerous,” on the issue of Obama’s energy bill, “because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson,” she said, her words becoming eerily familiar, “told us, ‘Having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,’ and the people—we the people—are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country.”

Violent revolt is a regular theme of Rush Limbaugh’s too. And Sarah Palin made what some considered to be her own coded call to arms when she aired a new catchphrase—”Don’t retreat, reload”—for her followers. She later said, during a speech in Nevada, that she was telling people, “Their arms are their votes. It’s not inciting violence. It’s telling people, Don’t ever let anybody tell you to sit down and shut up, Americans.”

Will the deniable words and twisted justifications for violence reach critical mass and push one unstable person over the edge? Hopefully we’ll never have to find out. (Or at least find out again.)

That’s Newsweek making all those sweeping connections, hardly insignificant stuff. Did they look at all the hatred and calls for violence coming from the left and see a pattern? Not with the king size blinders over their left side, they sure didn’t. They take a couple of quotes from rightwing figures, run them through the filter of leftwing analysis such as the Washington Post who of course see “rightwing hatred and intolerance,” and then say, “See how evil they are?” So Newsweek can connect Glenn Beck directly to Timothy McVeigh because another leftist publication made that connection for them, and Newseek is merely “reporting the facts.”

The media could obviously, of course, do unto the left exactly what they manage to do unto the right on a daily, almost second-by-second basis. But they won’t. Because they are leftwing propagandists, and honesty, facts and truth are the last things on their minds. I am quite willing to entertain the notion that NAACP president Alice Sams did not intend to make a call to violence. But if you’re going to argue that Sharon Angle did, at least be fair for once in your life. If quoting something because John F. Kennedy – the president who got America deeper into the Cold War, deeper into Vietnam and very deeply indeed into the Bay of Pigs mess – wasn’t violent, then why must quoting something that President Thomas Jefferson said be taken as violent? If we’re going to be fair for just two seconds? Shouldn’t the benefit of the doubt swing both ways once in a while?

But it never does.

So the media as a matter of routine blithely ignores all the giant logs of hate and anger and outright calls of violence there are coming from their own beloved left, but man do they spot every splinter coming from the despised right.

Now, you could point out that the NAACP president quoted John F. Kennedy whereas Sharon Angle quoted a hated founding father who helped lay the foundation for the even more hated Constitution. Which of course the left only hates less than the Holy Bible.

But that only gets us back to the rabid bias and the contempt for truth that the media manages to exhibit every minute of every day.

For the record, I am not a journalist and I do not profess to be one. I do not claim that I am “objective” and “nonpartisan.” So please don’t call me a hypocrite for doing the same thing that I say that mainstream media is doing. If you do so, I will immediately quote what I wrote here and correctly call you an idiot. Because unless and until the mainstream media says, “We’re a bunch of liberal ideologues and we all only see things from a leftwing perspective and denounce the right as a matter of reflex,” I’m NOT doing what the mainstream media does. Because unlike the mainstream media, I tell you exactly what perspective I’m coming from. The banner directly under my “Start Thinking Right” site name reads, “Michael Eden’s discussion of the two forbidden subjects – politics and religion – from a conservative perspective.” Unlike the deceitful mainstream media which reveals naked bias every single day, I never claim to be a neutral observer and objective reporter of the facts. Rather, I proudly report the facts from a stated Judeo-Christian and conservative world view. I never smuggle in my ideological bias and then report “opinion” as news like the mainstream media does in virtually every story they cover.

For the further record, I don’t denounce the mainstream media for their leftwing point of view; I denounce them for their blatantly false self-depiction of neutrality and objectivity when it is clearly not true.

I dare say that “liberal media personalities” (an oxymoron in virtually all cases for these prototypically moronic morons) such as Bill Maher and Rosie O’Donnell only have any following at all because they faithfully keep playing the game “Jump the Shark” they started with themselves. Every episode they have to be more hateful and more deceitful than they were last time – and every episode they manage to succeed.

“Now that they’ve finished reading the Constitution out loud,” Maher said to chuckles from the audience, “the tea baggers must call out that group of elitist liberals whose values are so antithetical to theirs. I’m talking of course about the founding fathers.”

Maher:

“Now, I want you teabaggers out there to understand one thing: while you idolize the Founding Fathers and dress up like them, and smell like them, I think it’s pretty clear that the Founding Fathers would have hated your guts. And what’s more, you would’ve hated them. They were everything you despise. They studied science, read Plato, hung out in Paris, and thought the Bible was mostly b—s—.”

Maher went on to claim that the Founding Fathers had a moral code, but it didn’t come from the Bible – ”except for the part about, ‘it’s cool to own slaves.’”

I mean, on a surface examination, I’m sure you’re right, Maher. They’d hate the people who actually care about what they wrote and what they thought; they’d love liberals like you, who demonize them as evil slaveholding bastards.

Clearly Obama’s speech wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, when his own side didn’t bother to pay attention to him about his “let’s make Christina proud of us” calls for restraint for even five minutes.

But let’s go beyond the surface, where the founding fathers love Bill Mahr – even though Bill Maher clearly despises them – and hates the tea party. Because maybe it’s not the way Maher thinks it is.

Bill Maher reminds me of Homer Simpson; both men think their incredibly stupid and buffoonish ideas are clever. The only difference between the two cartoon characters is that Homer Simpson usually discovers that he’s an idiot by the end of the episode, whereas Bill Maher is pathologically immune from reality or truth.

And, of course, unlike Maher, at least Homer is smart enough to believe in – as he calls him – “Jeebus.”

I’ve had to respond to these atheist versions of Homer Simpsons before. Here’s a response to one such that basically confronts Bill Maher with the facts he so despises:

This article consists as part of a much longer discussion with a self-described “Democratic socialist” found here (with much of the rest consisting over an argument as to what is or isn’t socialism and the supposed benefits of socialism to societies). An argument over the significance of the founding fathers relative to “current Americans” provides for what I believed to be an informative article.

Poster: I profoundly disagree that Christianity has been the wellspring of America’s greatness. Christianity in American history has too often been the source of narrow-mindedness, intolerance and reaction.

I too love and revere the Constitution, and would risk my neck to defend it and the USA. But the Constitution is a living, organic document that evolves and pulsates. I agree with the late Justice Brennan that the only correct way to interpret it is as modern Americans. I don’t care about the “original intent” of the Founding Fathers.

Michael Eden: Let me start with the words and meaning of George Washington in his Farewell Address given on September 17, 1796:

What are the foundations of America? After 45 years of public service, George Washington, our greatest patriot and the father of our country, gives his farewell address. He says, ‘We need to remember what brought us here. We need to remember what made us different from all the other nations across Europe and the rest of the world. We have to remember what our foundations are.’ It was the road map, showing us how we’d become what we were, and how to preserve it. It has long been considered the most important address ever given by any US president. President Lincoln set aside an entire day for the entire Union Army and had them read and understand it. Woodrow Wilson did the same during WWI. But we haven’t studied it in schools for over 45 years, so your lack of understanding is understandable. Washington said:

“Of all the habits and dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” — George Washington, Farewell Address

If you want your politics to prosper, the two things you will not separate will be religion and morality. If you want your government to work well, if you want American exceptionalism, if you want the government to do right, if you want all this, then you won’t separate religion and morality from political life. And America’s greatest patriot gave a litmus test for patriotism. He says in the very next sentence (immediately continuing from the quote above):

“In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.” — George Washington

Washington says, Anyone who would try to remove religion and morality from public life, I won’t allow them to call themselves a patriot. Because they are trying to destroy the country.

And he wasn’t alone. I can well understand why you would throw out the wisest and most brilliant political geniuses who ever lived. I can understand because George Washington wouldn’t have even have allowed you to call yourself “a patriot” in his presence. What they wrote, what they thought, what they believed, utterly refute you. But it was THESE men, and not Marx, or Mao, or any other socialist, who devised the greatest political system the world has ever seen.

Statements by our founding fathers (who presumably understood what the Constitution that they themselves wrote and ratified meant better than Justice Brennan) announcing their religious beliefs, and stating the profound impact those beliefs had in their founding of the United States of America:

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

“…And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” –- George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

“Religion and good morals are the only solid foundations of public liberty and happiness.” –- Samuel Adams, Letter to John Trumbull, October 16, 1778

“The great pillars of all government and of social life [are] virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor…and this alone, that renders us invincible.” –- Patrick Henry, Letter to Archibald Blair, January 8, 1789

“Without morals, a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion…are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.” —- Charles Carroll (signer of the Constitution), Letter to James McHenry,November 4, 1800

“Religion is the only solid basis of good morals; therefore education should teach the precepts of religion, and the duties of man towards God.” –- Life of Gouverneur Morris, Vol III

“Let divines and philosophers, statesmen and patriots, unite their endeavors to renovate the age, by impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls, of inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity…in short of leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system.“ –- Samuel Adams, Letter to John Adams, October 4, 1790

“In contemplating the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government. That is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by the means of the Bible.” —- Benjamin Rush, “A Defense of the Use of the Bible as a School Book”, 1798

“In my view, the Christian Religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed…no truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian Religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.” – Noah Webster, Reply to David McClure, Oct. 25, 1836

“Information to those who would remove (or move) to America”: “To this may be truly added, that serious Religion under its various Denominations, is not only tolerated, but respected and practiced. Atheism is unknown there, Infidelity rare & secret, so that Persons may live to a great Age in that Country without having their Piety shock’d by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel. And the Divine Being seems to have manifested his Approbation of the mutual Forbearance and Kindness with which the different Sects treat each other, by the remarkable Prosperity with which he has been pleased to favour the whole Country.” —- Ben Franklin, 1787 pamphlet to Europeans

“Independent of its connection with human destiny hereafter, the fate of republican government is indissolubly bound up with the fate of the Christian religion, and a people who reject its holy faith will find themselves the slaves of their own evil passions and of arbitrary power.” —- Lewis Cass, A Brigadier-General in the War of 1812, Governor of the Michigan Territory, a Secretary of War, a Senator, a Secretary of State. The State of Michigan placed his statue in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall.

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift of God? That they are not to violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.” –- “Yes, we did produce a near perfect Republic. But will they keep it, or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction.” —- Thomas Jefferson

“So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have exited thro’ all the time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe.” —- Thomas Jefferson

“I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with His providence and our riper years with His wisdom and power, and to whose goodness I ask you to join in supplications with me that He will so enlighten the minds of your servants, guide their councils, and prosper their measures that whatsoever they do shall result in your good, and shall secure to you the peace, friendship, and approbation of all nations.” – Thomas Jefferson

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens…” — George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

“Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.” — John Adams, Letter of June 21, 1776

“It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being.” —- George Washington

“So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have exited thro’ all the time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe.” —- Thomas Jefferson

“I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.” —- Abraham Lincoln

“History will also afford the frequent opportunities of showing the necessity of a public religion, from its usefulness to the public; the advantage of a religious character among private persons; the mischiefs of superstition, and the excellency of the Christian religion above all others, ancient or modern.” —- Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1749), p. 2

“I know, sir, how well it becomes a liberal man and a Christian to forget and forgive. As individuals professing a holy religion, it is our bounden duty to forgive injuries done us as individuals. But when the character of Christian you add the character of patriot, you are in a different situation. Our mild and holy system of religion inculcates an admirable maxim of forbearance. If your enemy smite one cheek, turn the other to him. But you must stop there. You cannot apply this to your country. As members of a social community, this maxim does not apply to you. When you consider injuries done to your country your political duty tells you of vengeance. Forgive as a private man, but never forgive public injuries. Observations of this nature are exceedingly unpleasant, but it is my duty to use them.” —- Patrick Henry, from a courtroom speech, Wirt Henry’s, Life, vol. III, pp. 606-607.

“Amongst other strange things said of me, I hear it is said by the deists that I am one of their number; and, indeed, that some good people think I am no Christian. This thought gives me much more pain than the appellation of Tory; because I think religion of infinitely higher importance than politics; and I find much cause to reproach myself that I have lived so long and have given no decided and public proofs of my being a Christian. But, indeed, my dear child, this is a character which I prize far above all this world has, or can boast.” —- Patrick Henry, 1796 letter to daughter, S. G. Arnold, The Life of Patrick Henry (Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1854), p. 250.

“This is all the inheritance I can give my dear family. The religion of Christ can give them one which will make them rich indeed.” — Patrick Henry, From a copy of Henry’s Last Will and Testament obtained from Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation, Red Hill, Brookneal, VA.

“It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being. It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being.” —- George Washington, James K. Paulding, A Life of Washington (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), Vol. II, p. 209.

“While we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe, the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to them whose minds have not yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” —- James Madison, James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance (Massachusetts: Isaiah Thomas, 1786). This can be found in numerous documentary histories and other resources.

“Waiving the rights of conscience, not included in the surrender implied by the social state, & more or less invaded by all Religious establishments, the simple question to be decided, is whether a support of the best & purest religion, the Christian religion itself ought not, so far at least as pecuniary means are involved, to be provided for by the Government, rather than be left to the voluntary provisions of those who profess it.” —- James Madison, Religion and Politics in the Early Republic: Jasper Adams and the Church-State Debate, Daniel L. Dreisbach, ed. (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), p. 117.

“The hand of Providence has been so conspicuous in all this that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked, that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligations.” —- George Washington, 1778, upon seeing the divine hand in the Revolution against the greatest military in the world.

“Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. In this sense and to this extent, our civilizations and our institutions are emphatically Christian.” — U.S. Supreme Court in Holy Trinity v. U. S. — Richmond v. Moore, Illinois Supreme Court, 1883)

“A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.” —- Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren dated February 12, 1779

“Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulties.” —- Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

“I entreat you in the most earnest manner to believe in Jesus Christ, for ‘there is no salvation in any other’ (Acts 4:12). If you are not reconciled to God through Jesus Christ – if you are not clothed with the spotless robe of His righteousness – you must perish forever.” —- John Witherspoon, founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence.

“I am a Christian. I believe only in the Scriptures, and in Jesus Christ my Savior.” — Charles Thomson, founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence

“My only hope of salvation is in the infinite transcendent love of God manifested to the world by the death of His Son upon the cross. Nothing but His blood will wash away my sins. I rely exclusively upon it. Come Lord Jesus! Come quickly!” — Dr. Benjamin Rush, founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence. Dr. Benjamin Rush, John Adams said, was one of the three most notable founding fathers along with George Washington and Ben Franklin. Benjamin Rush was the founder of five universities (three of which are still active today); he was the father of public schools under the American Constitution; he was also the leader of the civil rights movement, the founder of the first abolitionist society in America, the founder of the first black denomination in America, served in 3 presidential administrations, is called the father of American medicine, and 3,000 American physicians bore his signature on their diplomas, started the American College of Physicians, founded the first prison ministry, and started the Sunday School movement in America, started the very first Bible Society in America, etc.

“I rely upon the merits of Jesus Christ for a pardon of all my sins.” —- Samuel Adams

“An eloquent preacher of your religious society, Richard Motte, in a discourse of much emotion and pathos, is said to have exclaimed aloud to his congregation, that he did not believe there was a Quaker, Presbyterian, Methodist or Baptist in heaven, having paused to give his hearers time to stare and to wonder. He added, that in heaven, God knew no distinctions, but considered all good men as his children, and as brethren of the same family. I believe, with the Quaker preacher, that he who steadily observes those moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven, as to the dogmas in which they all differ. That on entering there, all these are left behind us, and the Aristides and Catos, the Penns and Tillotsons, Presbyterians and Baptists, will find themselves united in all principles which are in concert with the reason of the supreme mind. Of all the systems of morality, ancient and modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus.” — Thomas Jefferson, “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,” Albert Ellery Bergh, ed. (Washington, D. C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), Vol. XIII, pp.377-78, letter to William Canby on September 18, 1813.

“To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others.” — Thomas Jefferson, Albert Bergh, “Writings of Jefferson,” Vol. X, p.380, letter to Benjamin Rush on April 21, 1803.

“But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of His own country, was Jesus of Nazareth.” — Thomas Jefferson, Albert Bergh, “Writings of Jefferson,” Vol. XIV, p.220, letter to William Short on October 31, 1819.

“The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.” —- John Quincy Adams, 1837 speech

“Why is it that, next to the birth day of the Saviour of the World, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day [July 4th]? . . . Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birth-day of the Saviour? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the gospel dispensation? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon earth? That it laid the corner stone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity. . ?” — John Quincy Adams, John Quincy Adams, “An Oration Delivered Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport, at Their Request,” on the Sixty-first Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1837 (Newburyport: Charles Whipple, 1837), p. 5.

“We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better that the builders of Babel.” —- Benjamin Franklin, appeal for prayer at Constitutional Convention, as cited by James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, Henry D. Gilpin, ed. (Washington: Langtree & O’Sullivan, 1840), Vol. II, p. 985.

“God commands all men everywhere to repent. He also commands them to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and has assured us that all who do repent and believe shall be saved.” —- Roger Sherman.

“God has promised to bestow eternal blessings on all those who are willing to accept Him on the terms of the Gospel – that is, in a way of free grace through the atonement. — Roger Sherman. Sherman was the ONLY founding father who signed all four founding documents (the Declaration, the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and the Articles of Association). He is called “the master builder of the Constitution.” He came up with the bi-cabinal system with the House and Senate. He was a framer of the Bill of Rights. And he was also a theologian who got George Washington to announce the first federal Day of Thanksgiving proclamation, going through the Scriptures to show why we should do so. He was also a long-term member of Congress. A newspaper article on him (the Globe) dated 1837 quotes, “The volume which he consulted more than any other was the Bible. It was his custom, at the commencement of every session of Congress, to purchase a copy of the Scriptures to puruse it daily, and to present it to one of his children on his return.” He had 15 children.

“The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in His truth. Not a baptism, not a marriage, not a sacrament can be administered but by the Ghost.” —- John Adams

“There is no authority, civil or religious – there can be no legitimate government – but what is administered by the Holy Ghost.” —- John Adams

“There can be no salvation without it. All without it is rebellion and perdition, or, in more orthodox words, damnation.” — John Adams (And Abigail Adams was the REAL Bible thumper in the family, telling son John Quincy Adams, ‘You know how I’ve raised you. You know how you’ve been raised in church, how you’ve been taught the Scriptures, how you’ve been taught morality.’ She tells him that if he’s going to go to France and give up his faith, that the Lord seek him out and drown him to prevent that from happening).

“I am grateful to Almighty God for the blessings which, through Jesus Christ our Lord, He has conferred on my beloved country.” —- Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration and framer of the Bill of Rights. He was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, dying at the age of 95 years.

At the age of 89 (in 1825), he wrote, “On the mercy of my Redeemer, I rely for salvation, and on His merits; not on the works I have done in obedience to His precepts.” —- Charles Carroll

“Almost all the civil liberty now enjoyed in the world owes its origin to the principles of the Christian religion…. [T]he religion which has introduced civil liberty, is the religion of Christ and his apostles…. This is genuine Christianity, and to this we owe our free constitutions of government.” — Noah Webster, History of the United States (New Haven: Durrie & Peck, 1832), p. 300, Sec. 578.

And, of course, there is the assessment of the great political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville:

“Moreover, almost all the sects of the United States are comprised within the great unity of Christianity, and Christian morality is everywhere the same.

In the United States the sovereign authority is religious, and consequently hypocrisy must be common; but there is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

There are certain populations in Europe whose unbelief is only equaled by their ignorance and their debasement, while in America one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world fulfills all the outward duties of religion with fervor.

Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1851), pp. 331, 332, 335, 336-7, 337, respectively.

As to your socialism, de Tocquevelle wrote:

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”

Poster: Whatever outstanding Americans said or believed in the 1700’s or 1800’s is no refutation of whatever I said. Big deal, so George Washington said that morality is not possible without religion. Just because I appreciate that he spearheaded the military efforts against the redcoats doesn’t mean I care for his views on religion.

Many of the Founding Fathers you constantly bring up were not even Christians. Men like Jefferson, Franklin and Tom Paine were Deists. Forget the Founding Fathers when dealing with today’s issues. The Constitution that they gave us has evolved into something quite different since then.

I care what Americans today think. I am not interested in what men who died when even my grandfather was not yet born believed.

Michael Eden: Actually, one of the quotes that you probably didn’t bother to read has Thomas Jefferson specifically declaring his Christianity. And I have numerous quotes from Thomas Jefferson on display. Quotes by Benjamin Franklin abound – clearly attesting to his FERVENT commitment to the need for not only religious but specifically Christian religion as a necessary and fundamental support for the country being founded. I would further point out to you that Thomas Paine was NOT a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and he was also not a delegate to the Constitutional convention. So that kind of blows a gigantic hole in your thesis.

You show the portrait of the Declaration of Independence signing, and it’s funny that people have been trained to be able to pick out the two least religious founding fathers (Franklin and Jefferson – notwithstanding Jefferson’s profession of Christianity he was not as devoutly Christian as the rest). And then we’re assured that the rest of them are just as irreligious. But of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 54 were confessed Christians and members of Christian churches. 29 of them had seminary degrees and were ordained ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Not bad for a bunch of atheists and deists.

No one would ever have thought this was a secular nation in the past because Americans knew their history. An 1848 book used in public school for generations entitled, “Lives of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.” And in public schools for years children learned the faith and character of their founding fathers.

And again, everything they believed was an anathema to what you believe.

And that says something. Because what you say, what you think, what you believe, fundamentally doesn’t work – and never HAS worked. And what they said, what they thought, and what they believed, has stood in irrefutable proof of their wisdom.

Your argument is this: the Constitution has “evolved” into whatever the hell anybody wants it to mean. It is intrinsically meaningless. If the Constitution truly is a living, organic document that evolves and pulsates, it “evolves” into whatever you want it to become and “pulsates” into whatever form you want it to take. We might as well have a telephone directory as our Constitution, so that scholars in voodoo-fashion could discern “penumbras and emanations” wherever they wished.

Let’s take a look at the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Your atheistic socialism has never worked and never will work because you fundamentally deny the SOURCE of the rights you claim: an objective, transcendent Creator God who created man with these fundamental rights. You have never had, and never will have, anything concrete or objective by which to secure the rights that our founding fathers’ secured. Furthermore, you would do to any such transcendent/objective rights exactly what you want to do to the Constitution itself: make them mean whatever the hell you – or the next dictator/tyrant on the block – WANT them to mean. And that is why your God-denying socialism has produced one despot and one nightmare after another, and why it always WILL.

What socialists ultimately pursue is power over people’s lives. And so long as leftists hold such power, principles will not matter. And frankly, even if there WERE any “binding” principles they would invariably be blurred into meaninglessness by a succession of “penumbras and emanations” to suit the will of the next dictator. That ultimately becomes tyranny every single time.

And that is why George Washington would be kicking your butt across the floor as he shouted, “YOU ARE NO PATRIOT!”

You instead argue for a system of government that has NEVER worked and never will. I will tilt at the government handed down by my religious founding fathers and leave you to tilt at your godless socialist windmills.

SAN FRANCISCO – A federal judge overturned California’s same-sex marriage ban Wednesday in a landmark case that could eventually land before the U.S. Supreme Court to decide if gays have a constitutional right to marry in America.

Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker made his ruling in a lawsuit filed by two gay couples who claimed the voter-approved ban violated their civil rights. Gay couples waving rainbow and American flags outside the courthouse cheered, hugged and kissed as word of the ruling spread.

Despite the favorable ruling for same-sex couples, gay marriage will not be allowed to resume. That’s because the judge said he wants to decide whether his order should be suspended while the proponents pursue their appeal in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The judge ordered both sides to submit written arguments by Aug. 6 on the issue.

Supporters argued the ban was necessary to safeguard the traditional understanding of marriage and to encourage responsible childbearing.

California voters passed the ban as Proposition 8 in November 2008, five months after the state Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.

“Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples,” the judge wrote in a 136-page ruling that laid out in precise detail why the ban does not pass constitutional muster.

The judge found that the gay marriage ban violates the Constitution’s due process and equal protection clauses.

This is now the third time that a judge substituted his will for the clear will of the people in the state of California. There’s a phrase in the Declaration of Independence that no longer matters: “deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed.” Of course, there are other phrases that liberals despise in the Declaration of Independence as well, such as “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

For the official record, Thomas Jefferson – who wrote the Declaration of Independence – would have led the revolt against these evil, malicious, degenerate judges and supervised their tarring and feathering.

“The Constitution . . . meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804. ME 11:51

Thus this isn’t judicial activism; it’s judicial DESPOTISM.

The people no longer have any real power in this country. Some unelected judge overturned the will of the people in Arizona by substituting her own ridiculous reasoning for the law. Now this. And soon states like Missouri – which issued a 71%-to-29% smackdown to ObamaCare – will likewise fall prey to judicial despotism. Why even bother to vote when your will is continually overturned by despotism? Of course, that’s exactly how liberal fascists want you to think. They want you to give up. Because socialism is only accepted by an apathetic, defeated people.

Let me address the specific objections to traditional marriage:

“Equal protection”? How is that violated by a law that defines marriage as the union between one man and one woman?

A gay man has the right to marry any adult woman who will have him – the same as me. There’s your “equal protection.” On a platter.

If a gay man doesn’t want to take advantage of that, then that’s his loss. But radically redefining marriage into something it has never been in the history of this nation – or for that matter the history of Western Civilization, or for that matter any civilization period – is not a response that any morally intelligent individual would descend into.

How about the concept of “due process”?How does redefining marriage from an institution to a convention that can be radically transformed by judicial fiat encourage due process? All it does is create undue process. How will this judge now prevent three men from marrying? If you can redefine the “one man and one woman thing,” why can’t you redefine the “two people” thing? And by what objective standard that can never be overturned? And if three people can marry, why can’t fifteen or more? Just who are you to impose your narrow-minded morality on thirty people who want to get married to each other?

The same thing goes to inter-species marriage: just who the hell are you to say that that weird woman next door can’t marry her Great Dane? Or her Clydesdale Stallion, for that matter? Why can’t I marry my canary?

And you’d better have a damn good reason for restricting each of these, or they’ll probably be legal next month.

Gays want the right to marry. The North American Man/Boy Love Association wants the right to have men marry boys. Unlike homosexuals, pedophiles actually have something approaching a historic case: the Roman world had something called pederasty, in which men gave boys mentoring and help with their futures in exchange for the boys giving up their virginal backsides.

The liberal culture says a twelve year old girl has the right to an abortion on demand without her parents’ consent. That’s a very adult decision, not unlike a very similar adult decision to have a relationship with the adult who impregnated her in the first place. Why not give NAMBLA what it wants? It’s not fair to allow two people who love each other not to marry, after all, right? That’s the argument we keep hearing, so let’s be consistent. Why are we denying the right of men and boys to marry whomever they choose?

NAMBLA has been a member of the International Lesbian and Gay Association for 10 years. We’ve been continuously active in ILGA longer than any other US organization. NAMBLA delegates to ILGA helped write ILGA’s constitution, its official positions on the sexual rights of youth, and its stands against sexual coercion and corporal punishment. We are proud of our contributions in making ILGA a stronger voice for the international gay and lesbian movement and for sexual justice.

Given the fact that judges can usurp the clearly expressed will of the people and impose their own “morality” as they choose, it is guaranteed that we will legalize the buggery of young boys down the road. Secular humanism simply doesn’t have the moral resources to prevent it.

Who are you not to allow your little boy to get married to some forty-year old “lover,” you intolerant pig?

People who defend traditional marriage have an easy and powerful defeater for these objections. Gay marriage proponents have none. If I’m wrong, then just finish this thought: “A marriage of three people will never be allowed by a court to happen because…”. And don’t say that it won’t ever happen because marriage is a particular type of thing, because that was our argument, and you ran roughshod over it.

The last idea is this commonly-heard challenge: “How does allowing gay marriage harm heterosexual marriage?”

Gay activists look at the gay-marriage countries and argue that divorces have leveled off. But the problem with that line of reasoning is that divorce only becomes a factor if people actually bother to get married in the first place. And the fact of the matter is that they AREN’T bothering to get married. Because marriage is being destroyed.

When a young man today says “I do” in a marriage to his wife, he is continuing an institution that his parents, his parents’ parents, and his parents’ parents’ parents – going all the way back to Adam and Eve (i.e., and NOT Adam and Steve).

We go back to the very beginning when GOD instituted marriage. And God said:

“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).

“Shall cleave to his WIFE” – not to whoever or whatever the hell happens to turn his fancy.

Gay marriage does to marriage what cancer does to the cells of a body – it alters it, it corrupts it, and ultimately it destroys it.

Marriage is no longer a holy union between a man and a woman under God that the state recognizes; it becomes a convention BY the state APART from God that can be changed at will by powerful elites who have determined that they know better than God.

So yeah, gay marriage hurts legitimate marriage. Because it destroys the very concept of marriage.

Max Baucus gave us yet another remark from a Democrat acknowledging the REAL purpose of ObamaCare:

“Too often, much of late, the last couple three years the maldistribution of income in America is gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and the middle income class is left behind. Wages have not kept up with increased income of the highest income in America. This legislation will have the effect of addressing that maldistribution of income in America.”

Here’s Baucus on Youtube explaining the need to use Obamacare to redistribute wealth:

We can go back to Obama himself, of course, and hear him talking about “spreading the wealth” to Joe the Plumber.

Redistribution of wealth wants to “spread out” equality, such that we’re all level.

But we’re NOT all level. Some people are smarter than other people. Some people are bigger and stronger and faster than others. Some people are more creative than others. Some people have a higher work ethic or ethics in general ethic than others. Some people work harder than others. And darn it, some people are just better looking than others.

And since we’re not all level, we see wildly disparate economic results. When liberals try to “level the playing field” and “spread the wealth around” and “address the maldistribution of wealth,” what they are doing is not merely ignoring fundamental economic realities, but fundamental human realities.

If they’re going to “level the playing field,” they should be consistent, and apply their philosophy across the board.

Even when you get aside from the blameworthiness of the poor (i.e., never bothering to get off one’s butt to look for a job; or never working hard enough or showing responsibility enough to advance to the next level), you’ve still got some issues with wealth redistribution. For instance, is it “fair” that some people are far more physically attractive than others? Those pretty people get all the opportunities; whereas, non-pretty people, through no fault of their own, must struggle. We should redistribute beauty!!! We should be carving up the pretty people and giving some of their beautiful features to the non-pretty people!!!

I mean, why feel sorry for somebody who never bothered to apply himself or herself? Who never bothered to work hard, or pursue training/schooling, or made smart choices? It would seem that that short, fat, butt-ugly guy with the unfortunate flatulence should be the one who merits our sympathy, if anyone does.

That’s the SAME idiotic reasoning that is used to justify wealth redistribution.

We could also move to re-distributing justice.

Let’s take it on the liberal’s argument. It’s not that black inner-city gang banging kid’s fault that he’s a violent criminal; it’s society’s fault. That poor kid is a victim. That poor kid didn’t get the economic opportunities that others did. He didn’t have a safe home environment. He didn’t have good public schools. He was surrounded by poverty and the grinding consequences of poverty, and he was literally conditioned into his life of crime. So let’s take the punishment that falls on that kid for his crime and redistribute it, spread it out, and make it “fair.” It seems to me that if that inner city gang-banger murders some innocent kid in a drive-by shooting, Al Gore should go to jail. Maybe Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi, and we can “spread the justice” between the two of them.

I mean, that poor guy doesn’t have any freedom (metaphor for wealth). He’s facing life. And there are all sorts of people outside the penitentiary who have all sorts of freedom. So we can help that guy out by grabbing you and taxing some of your freedom so we can redistribute it to the convict.

If that welfare queen shouldn’t be held responsible for her “inability” to get off her butt and work, why should the gang-banger be held responsible for his “inability” to live an ethical life?

You know what the liberal will say: “Well, that welfare queen isn’t hurting anybody.”

But she damn sure is: she’s hurting me. She’s hurting my kids. Because some jerk keeps seizing my wealth and the wealth I want to leave for my children and giving it to that welfare queen. She sure IS hurting other people with her laziness and indolence. And in point of fact the only way she’s NOT going to hurt other people is if liberals stop taking other peoples’ money and redistributing it to her.

Burton Folsom, Jr. points out how this mindset was anathema to America until FDR came along:

Throughout American history, right from the start, charity had been a state and local function. Civic leaders, local clergy, and private citizens, evaluated the legitimacy of people’s need in their communities or counties; churches and other organizations could then provide food, shelter, and clothing to help victims of fires or women abandoned by drunken husbands. Most Americans beleived that the face-to-face encounters of givers and receivers of charity benefited both groups. It created just the right amount of uplift and relief, and discouraged laziness and a poor work ethic.

The Founders saw all relief as local and voluntary, and the Constitution gave no federal role for the government in providing charity. James Madison, in defending the Constitution, observed, “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.” In other words, if relief, and other areas, were made functions of the federal government, the process would become politicized and politicians and deadbeats could conspire to trade votes for food” (New Deal or Raw Deal, page 76-77).

The way it used to be is the way it ought to be again.

Folsom goes on to document how A) administrations and courts had throughout history repeatedly ruled “welfare” programs unconstitutional until the New Deal and B) how they did in fact become a political boondoggle during the New Deal. And that has been the growing trend ever since.

Benjamin Franklin put it this way: “When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

Samuel Adams said:

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

“Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. … Six days shalt thou labor, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them.”

These three statements, when combined together, mean: 1) Those who don’t pay their own way are a disgrace to themselves and a disgrace to their countrymen; 2) If you ARE forced to pay your own way in life, you will ultimately be the better for it, both in your provision and in your character; and 3) If we continue on the social welfare spending track we’re on, we will destroy our nation.

Liberals yearn to be more like Europe, just as they always have. Thomas Jefferson said, “With all the defects in our Constitution, whether general or particular, the comparison of our government with those of Europe, is like a comparison of Heaven with Hell.” And that is every bit as true today as it was when Jefferson said it.

FDR waged a war on poverty that has been going on for 77 years. Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty anew in 1964. And poverty has been kicking our asses ever since. We’re no better off than we were before; in fact, we’re worse off.

There’s that Dr. Phil question: “How’s federal government war on poverty working for you?

Frankly, if we had been “redistributing” pieces out of Brad Pitt’s and Angelina Jolie’s faces to give to the less beautiful, or if we’d been “redistributing” justice by taking freedom from Al Gore or Hillary Clinton to give more freedom to convicts, it would have been morally idiotic. Still, if we’d done those things instead of redistributing wealth, it would have saved us a few million tons of money.

(CNSNews.com) – When CNSNews.com asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance–a mandate included in both the House and Senate versions of the health care bill–Pelosi dismissed the question by saying: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter. Her press spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, then told CNSNews.com that asking the speaker of the House where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandated that individual Americans buy health insurance as not a “serious question.”

“You can put this on the record,” said Elshami. “That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.”

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”

You can understand why Nancy Pelosi couldn’t care less about the Constitution, or its limitations on the exercise of government power. Thomas Jefferson also said, “Let’s hear no more about the confidence in men but to bind them down by the chains of the Constitution.” That phrase was intended to underscore the role of the Constitution as chains to any who would try to impose more government on the people. But Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat Party have thrown off the “chains of the Constitution.” They believe that confidence in men is just fine – as long as those men are liberals and socialists who impose massive government and massive bureaucracies through which they seek to empower themselves and control the people. And everything they are trying to do makes a mockery of the Constitution.

“I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory, to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.”

One wonders how Barack Obama could swear to uphold and defend a document that he himself has publicly held to have deep flaws and reflect an enormous blind spot. It would seem that his oath amounted to “just words.”

The excellent work on the Constitution and its history by W. Cleon Skousen entitled The 5000 Year Leap has an amazing thesis in light of what we are seeing from our government today:

Since the genius of the American system is maintaining the eagle in the balanced center of the spectrum, the Founders warned against a number of temptations which might lure subsequent generations to abandon their freedoms and their rights by subjecting themselves to a strong federal administration operating on the collectivist Left.

They warned against the “welfare state” where the government endeavors to take care of everyone from the cradle to the grave. Jefferson wrote:

“If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.”

They warned against confiscatory taxation and deficit spending. Jefferson said it was immoral for one generation to pass on the results of its extravagance in the form of debts to the next generation. He wrote: “…we shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life [expectancy] of the majority.”

Every generation of Americans struggled to pay off the national debt up until the present one.

Let us see what the founding fathers who wrote our Constitution said that liberals so eagerly and so cavalierly wish to dismiss from the people’s attention:

“I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple, applying all the possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt, and not for a multiplication of officers and salaries merely to make partisans, and for increasing, by every device, the public debt on the principle of its being a public blessing.” — Thomas Jefferson letter to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799

“As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible.” — George Washington, Farewell Address, September 17, 1796

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“If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.” — Thomas Jefferson, to Thomas Cooper, January 29, 1802

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“[W]ith all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?

Still one thing more, fellow citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.” — Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

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“He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing.” Benjamin Franklin, from his writings, 1758

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“We are endeavoring, too, to reduce the government to the practice of a rigorous economy, to avoid burdening the people, and arming the magistrate with a patronage of money, which might be used to corrupt and undermine the principles of our government.”– Thomas Jefferson, letter to Mr. Pictet, February 5, 1803

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“With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.” — James Madison

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“My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.” –Thomas Jefferson

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“To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” –Thomas Jefferson

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“I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse.” — James Madison letter to Henry Lee, April 13, 1790

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“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” — Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23

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“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” — Benjamin Franklin

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“Experience has proved to us that a dollar of silver disappears for every dollar of paper emitted.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1791. ME 8:208

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“If the debt which the banking companies owe be a blessing to anybody, it is to themselves alone, who are realizing a solid interest of eight or ten per cent on it. As to the public, these companies have banished all our gold and silver medium, which, before their institution, we had without interest, which never could have perished in our hands, and would have been our salvation now in the hour of war; instead of which they have given us two hundred million of froth and bubble, on which we are to pay them heavy interest, until it shall vanish into air… We are warranted, then, in affirming that this parody on the principle of ‘a public debt being a public blessing,’ and its mutation into the blessing of private instead of public debts, is as ridiculous as the original principle itself. In both cases, the truth is, that capital may be produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper.” –Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:423

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“It is a [disputed] question, whether the circulation of paper, rather than of specie [gold,silver], is a good or an evil… I believe it to be one of those cases where mercantile clamor will bear down reason, until it is corrected by ruin.” –Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:409

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“To contract new debts is not the way to pay for old ones.”– George Washington letter to James Welch, April 7, 1799

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“The maxim of buying nothing without the money in our pockets to pay for it would make of our country one of the happiest on earth.” — Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, 1787. ME 6:192

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The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. — Thomas Jefferson

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“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.” — Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766

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“Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. St. Monday and St. Tuesday, will soon cease to be holidays. Six days shalt thou labor, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them.” — Benjamin Franklin letter to Collinson, May 9, 1753

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“I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.” — Thomas Jefferson

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“I hope a tax will be preferred [to a loan which threatens to saddle us with a perpetual debt], because it will awaken the attention of the people and make reformation and economy the principle of the next election. The frequent recurrence of this chastening operation can alone restrain the propensity of governments to enlarge expense beyond income.” — Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 1820.

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“If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare… they may appoint teachers in every state… The powers of Congress would subvert the very foundation, the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America.” — James Madison

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“I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” –Thomas Jefferson

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“The same prudence, which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public monies.” — Thomas Jefferson letter to Shelton Giliam, June 19, 1808

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“It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense. … They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.” — Adam Smith, “Wealth of Nations,” Book II, Chapter II

“Every discouragement should be thrown in the way of men who undertake to trade without capital.” — Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Tracy, 1785. Papers 8:399

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“It is a miserable arithmetic which makes any single privation whatever so painful as a total privation of everything which must necessarily follow the living so far beyond our income.” –Thomas Jefferson to William Hay, 1787. ME 6:223

And now they are touting their health care bill – and the gimmickry they have played to make it appear “deficit neutral” over the long haul – and their cap-and-trade legislation, to say that their massive spending is really an “investment” in the future as well.

Don’t buy their spin.

Stop the madness. Stop the depraved and insane spending. Stop the Democrats from imposing a socialist agenda that will take away our freedoms and tax us into oblivion all in the name of helping us.

Stop the founding fathers from having to spin in their graves.

It has often occurred to me these past months that the founding fathers were willing to fight in order to throw off tyranny that were virtually nothing compared to the onerous ones we are being fitted with today.

There’s a debate going on in this country that is far wider than health care. Health care is the current battle; but the war is over the size, scope, and power of government over our lives.

Years prior to World War II, in 1931, Pope Pius XI denounced Benito Mussolini’s socialism as “Statolatry,” the idolatry of a worship of and dependence upon the state rather than God. And less than a decade later it would be socialism – both fascist and Marxist – which would bring hell on earth rather than the utopias the socialists had so falsely promised. Today, the American left wants more government, and then more, and ever more. Government as God, the State as Savior, meeting every need and demanding that it be the sole arbiter for determining what is right and what is wrong. And the American people are increasingly being compelled to abandon the free market system in exchange for one featuring increasing government control over every sphere of our lives.

The first of our two articles, from the Los Angeles Times, suggests that the vision of the founding fathers, particularly in the ideas of Thomas Jefferson for a small, limited federal government, should be cast aside as outmoded and anachronistic.

From the very beginning of our national history, Americans have been arguing about the proper role of government. Put succinctly, the dispute is between those who regard government as “them” and those who see it as “us.”

Our two founding documents embody the tension in its classical form. The Declaration of Independence locates sovereignty in the individual citizen, who possesses the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as Thomas Jefferson so lyrically put it, and the power of government is described as an alien force that must be put on the permanent defensive. The Constitution enshrines “the people” as the sovereign agent, with a Bill of Rights that defines a protected region where government cannot intrude, but otherwise identifies a collective interest best managed by a federal government empowered to make decisions for the society as a whole.

All of United States political history can be understood as a perpetual debate between these two competing perspectives, symbolized at the start in the clash between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. The Jeffersonian position, with its emphasis on a minimalist government, prevailed throughout the 19th century and imprinted itself on the DNA of American culture as a quasi-sacred political creed.

By the start of the 20th century, as the United States became a more densely populated, ethnically diverse society, with an industrial economy dominated by large corporations, the Jeffersonian perspective grew increasingly anachronistic. It became abundantly clear that government power was necessary to regulate the swoonish swings of the marketplace, provide a safety net for poor and elderly citizens and protect the environment. Thus the Federal Reserve Board, Social Security, Medicare and the Environmental Protection Agency.

But despite these projections of the Hamiltonian ethos, which presumes that there is a collective public interest that only government can serve, the Jeffersonian ethos remains a potent force, and not just in the right wing of the Republican Party. It colors the conversation about all the major domestic problems facing the Obama administration in ways that stigmatize as socialistic what we might ironically describe as the self-evident solutions.

In the healthcare debate, for example, there is a national consensus that we have a broken and bloated system. But instead of replacing it with the kind of single-payer government-run system adopted by most of the developed countries on the planet, that option is ruled out of order at the start of the debate. As a result, the best we can hope for is modest reform of an inherently flawed and expensive system. […]

It should be realized that Joseph Ellis is hardly the only liberal who thinks in terms of moving away from the government or the ideas of our founding fathers. Allow me to quote Barack Obama:

Obama: “I think that we can say that the Constitution reflected the enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day and that the framers had that same blind spot.”

Obama talked about “the fundamental flaw of this country…”

Obama: “But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution…”

Hardly an affirmation of the wisdom of our founding fathers, who created the greatest system of government the world has ever seen.

I would submit, first of all, that Alexander Hamilton would be just as appalled at the gigantic colossus our government has become as would Jefferson. I would suggest that neither man, seeing the enormous and unresponsive federal bureaucracy, would view the gargantuan federal bureaucracy as “us.” They would see it as an alien power running amok over the people’s lives. They would see it as a far greater tyranny than the one imposed by the British king whom they had defeated.

To quote Mark Levin, from Liberty and Tyranny:

“The founders understood that the greatest threat to liberty is an all-powerful central government, where the few dictate to the many. They also knew that the rule of the mob would lead to anarchy and, in the end, despotism” (4).

They understood government as a necessary evil, rather than as a desired goal. In the words of James Madison, the most influential of the authors of the Constitution, in Federalist 51:

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

And I would ask, what evidence is there that the federal government is in any way “controlling itself?”

First of all, we have growing by leaps and bounds what Alexis de Tocqueville described as a “soft tyranny“:

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”

Secondly, the federal government has immersed itself – and the American people – into levels of debt that boggle the limits of human comprehension. We now have a national debt of well over $100 trillion, if we count (which we should) our “unfunded liabilities” such as the Social Security and the Medicare which Joseph Ellis so praises. And as for Barack Obama – the president whose policies Ellis is writing to defend:

“Mr. Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents — from George Washington to George W. Bush — combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.”

And that is before the huge costs of ObamaCare; it is before Cap-and-trade; it is before anything Obama wants to do for the remaining 3 1/2 years of his presidency. This is no government that is “controlling itself.” Anything but.

Incredibly, Ellis ends his article with this:

No less an American hero than George Washington put it rather defiantly in 1785: “We are either a united people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation. … If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending it.” And even Jefferson acknowledged that his anti-government vision would become irrelevant once we ceased being an agricultural society and that future generations — meaning us — would at some point need to throw off what he called “the dead hand of the past.”

Joseph Ellis doesn’t want us to think about what it was that Washington actually intended to provide us with “unity.” Rather, he wants to import his own meaning of “unity” as one being imposed via a massive octopus of federal power. But George Washington had a very different idea of national unity than does Ellis. In his Farewell Address – considered one of the most important political addresses in American history – George Washington said:

“Of all the habits and dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.” — George Washington, Farewell Address

Think of the implications of that statement. Our greatest founding father essentially said, ‘If you want your politics to prosper, the two things you will not separate will be religion and morality. If you want your government to work well, if you want American exceptionalism, if you want the government to do right, if you want all of the benefits and none of the curses of government, then you won’t separate religion and morality from political life.’ And America’s greatest patriot gave a litmus test for patriotism, arguing, ‘Anyone who would try to remove religion and morality from public life, I will not allow them to call themselves a patriot. Because they are trying to destroy the country.’

So liberals do not want the limited government fought for and instituted by our founding fathers. The founding fathers – Alexander Hamilton included – simply do not permit the Statism that the modern American left want. What kind of government do they want in its place?

Every so often, history serves up an analogy that’s uncomfortable, a little distracting and yet still very relevant.

In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways.

More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.

The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escape the Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later). Harold James, an economic historian, says that the young liberal economists studying under John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s began to debate whether Hitler had solved unemployment.

No sane person enjoys mixing nuance and Nazis, but this bit of economic history has a particular importance this week. In the run-up to the G-20 meeting, European leaders have resisted calls for more government spending. Last week, the European Union president, Mirek Topolanek, echoed a line from AC/DC — whom he had just heard in concert — and described the Obama administration’s stimulus plan as “a road to hell.”

Here in the United States, many people are understandably wondering whether the $800 billion stimulus program will make much of a difference. They want to know: Does stimulus work? Fortunately, this is one economic question that’s been answered pretty clearly in the last century.

Yes, stimulus works. […]

Incredibly, when you put the liberal Los Angeles Times together with the liberal New York Times, the message is: “Be a lot less like Thomas Jefferson, and a lot more like Adolf Hitler”.

David Leonhardt certainly did not want his readers to think of Barack Obama as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. He tried to provide all the necessary caveats. Nevertheless, this reminds us of a core truth of the Nazis that liberals generally don’t want you to think about; that the word ‘Nazi’ is an acronym for the “National Socialist German Workers Party.” And the fact that both the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the National Socialist German Workers Party stand as grim reminders that socialism is ever an experiment that can go terribly, terribly wrong.

Jonah Goldberg addresses how this massive demarcation between the intellectual traditions of the American right and left continues to this very day:

“No top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger. All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment–John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke–and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism. Meanwhile, the ranks of the leftwing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition. And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents. The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values–even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments” (Liberal Fascism, 175-6).

Joe the Plumber heard Barack Obama talk about “spreading the wealth around” and responded, “That sounds like socialism.” The mainstream media went ballistic in its denial that Barack Obama had anything whatsoever to do with socialism. And then he won, and the liberal publication Newseek proudly trumpeted on it’s February 16th cover, “WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW.”

The “kind of single-payer government-run system adopted by most of the developed countries on the planet” LA Times writer Joseph Ellis describes is simply “socialized medicine” by another name. Ellis complains about conversations that “stigmatize as socialistic”; the problem with that characterization is that they ARE socialistic.

There’s been this movement by the elitists among us to be more like sophisticated Europe dating all the way back to our founding. Some say today, “What Europeans do with government is pretty good. And what they do with civil rights is pretty good. And what they do with health care is pretty good.” And there’s this move to be more like Europe. In our Supreme Court liberal justices routinely cite what Europe does in their law in order to replace what we do in ours. Thomas Jefferson made a statement against the “Let’s be like Europe” that is every bit as valid today as it was the day he made it:

“The comparisons of our government with those of Europe are like a comparison of heaven and hell.” — Thomas Jefferson

Whether health care, cap-and-trade, or anything else our modern Europe-envying elitists want to do, it falls in the face of the fact that America has dwarfed Europe in economic output, productivity, and wealth. We’re constantly told that we need to be more like Europe and offer socialized medicine in order to be more “competitive.” If that is so, than why is it Europe – which has socialized medicine – that has long struggled to be competitive?

In the health care debate Ronald Reagan had a warning for us. Way back in 1961 he said:

“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.”

It was a speech that could have easily popped out of a time capsule labeled, “Open in event of future threat from socialized medicine.”

Mark Levin said:

“The Statist veils his pursuits in moral indignation, intoning in high dudgeon the injustices and inequities of liberty and life itself, for which only he can provide justice and bring a righteous resolution. And when the resolution proves elusive, as it undoubtedly does – whether the Marxist promise of “the workers’ paradise” or the Great Society’s “war on poverty” – the Statist demands ever more authority to wring out the imperfections of mankind’s existence. Unconstrained by constitutional prohibitions, what is left to limit the Statist’s ambitions but his own moral compass, which has already led him astray! He is never circumspect about his own shortcomings. Failure is not a product of his beliefs but merely want of power and resources. Thus are born endless rationalizations for seizing ever more governmental authority” (Liberty and Tyranny, 10).

It is time to end the advance of the good-intentioned-paved road to hell. We have a government that is spending too much, taxing too much, and intruding too much into the lives of Americans. It is time to be a lot less like Hitler and the socialists and a lot more like the founding fathers and the recognition of the fixed and non-violable constitutional limits they created.